


where the dead men lost their bones

by transubstantiate



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-22 21:57:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8302732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transubstantiate/pseuds/transubstantiate
Summary: They are all in the business of loss, here in the keep. All in the business of scars and broken things, and it reminds her of a camp she once knew.Morrigan at Skyhold.





	

She watched, for a while, before. She didn’t leave the court, oh no, but eyes aren’t her only way of seeing.

And when the invitation comes, and the change and the betrayal, she leaves, she follows these agents of the Inquisition back to the place they call Skyhold.

She drifts through the keep, silent, a dog gnawing a bone under a table in the main hall where a dwarf holds his head in his hands and gazes at the floor. He is empty, lost, and she can smell the forgetting on his skin. He won’t dream this night, or the next, so he won’t see, won’t visit.

A corpse and a spider walk into the arena, she says to him, and he looks up, finally, and at her. She lifts her head from the bone and wags her tail.

Across the hall, she is a sparrow, nesting in the eaves above a woman who shuffles her feet helplessly, watching the dwarf write. The woman hurts, and flexes her hand, and takes a step toward him, but turns sharply to exit.

The woman hurts, pity and regret and shame, but she cannot unbend the steel or the war from her spine, and so she passes on.

The stable is warm and full of fat mice that she hunts as a cat, and the man carving a griffon does not smell of the taint, and wears his borrowed time like a suit of armor.

There is a woman in the tower who knows right away that she is not a raven, when she takes that shape, but feeds her and gives her a message nevertheless.

She takes the message and takes to the sky, and the span of her wings is the entire earth.

\----

This woman was a friend, or might have been one, but now she is guarded, heart and hand and eye.

Morrigan does not pity her, nor what they have both lost.

Things don’t happen, or they do, and the world is built on accidents of fate and calculations of will.

Once, a Warden died when she wasn’t supposed to, and Morrigan’s world fractured just as surely as Leliana’s.

Another old god lost to the sword, another life wasted needlessly. She had feel the magic leech out the world as the Warden’s blade had bit deep into the dragon’s head.

It had looked at her, the Warden, in the end. It had gazed long and hard, and she had gazed back. They breathed, once, twice, together, and then the dragon had collapsed, very suddenly old and tired, all its muscles relaxing at once, and the Warden, dead in all her bright armor, had tumbled down off the battlements with it.

They found her body at the foot of the wall, tangled in the dragon’s wings, and Morrigan had held the crest of its head in her hands while Leliana had held the Warden, and wept.

"It was all for nothing," Morrigan said, dry eyed, to the dragon. "Leaving, coming back, the ritual: it didn’t matter."

Before her, Leliana clutched the Warden’s body, something precious, something lost.

She was a wolf, and she vanished while they were still pulling bodies from the wreckage of the palace.

She hadn’t wanted a child, anyway.

\----

The Inquisitor is hard and lean, an elf, a warrior, and Morrigan hears whispers that the Lavellan clan was systematically destroyed by a duke in the Free Marches, and one night while she is a rat in the rotunda, watching the elven mage ignore her, the Inquisitor finds him.

“I should have been with them,” she says hollowly, without preamble. “By rights, I should be dead.”

“What is right?” he asks her, but his voice is quiet.

“I don’t want this,” she hisses, and she thrusts her hand at him. “Take it off, get rid of it!”

“I can’t do that,” he says, and his voice is quiet as before.

“Cut off my hand, then.”

“I will not.”

The Inquisitor lets out a sound then, anguished, and Morrigan does not know what it is. She has lived a long time, and been many things, but she has never been forgotten.

They are all in the business of loss, here in the keep. All in the business of scars and broken things, and it reminds her of a camp she once knew.

It does not surprise her when the Inquisitor muscles past her to step into the well, to turn and cast an angry look over her shoulder, to cup what is more than water in her hands and to drink, drink, drink. It does not surprise her, but she resents it anyway.

Less so, when her mother is Mythal, and the Inquisitor is bound to her will.

She is free, Morrigan is, she is a raven and she is gone, again, into the wild places. Soon she will be found, by Mythal, or by the waking world, but for now she is free. She is wild, she is The Wild, and she will live forever.


End file.
